Middle school students in my classes are strong visual and verbal learners. It is necessary, however, to lay the groundwork, supply background information, and
bridge
the deeper comprehension gap in order for any intellectual impact to occur. To highlight the process of understanding the complexities of the arts using these strengths, I will present my students first with images of Michelangelo’s
God Creating Adam
and
The Last Judgment
from the Sistine Chapel on an overhead projector and elicit from them what they see. Here, my expectation is that they will record in their journals the figures they see, the positions they are in, the nudity present, the colorations of the frescos, and their understanding of what the picture might represent. This is layer one. Using these visual representations will be a stepping stone to help the students understand that, like visual art, language, too, has many layers. I will use two sources for this activity: the website http://mv.vatican.va/3_EN/pages/CSN/CSN_Volta.html, which contains excellent background information and a virtual tour of the Chapel, and Trewin Coppleston’s
Michelangelo,
which supplies an extensive look into the life and times of the artist. This resource contains excellent photographs that can be shown as added examples of the Chapel’s wonderful art.
Once answers are shared, it will be important to solicit from the students what information would be needed to help them understand the paintings more completely, perhaps by asking, “What
doesn’t
the picture tell us?” Guidance here will be necessary as I will want to encourage them to think about this question in its broadest context. The more obvious responses might be: more about the painter and his life, the history of the time, what the entire chapel looked like, the process the artist used to paint the ceiling, and whether any restorative work was ever needed to maintain the ceiling. These suggestions will act as an introduction to the contextual backgrounds of information on Michelangelo and historical information on the Medici family of Florence and Pope Julius II of the Catholic Church in Rome, as well as graphic information on the dimensional layout of the Chapel.
It is not my intent to burden my students with extensive historical background on any of these topics but rather to introduce them to the concept that a reader can draw a richer and more comprehensive view of literature and, for that matter, life by probing the background of the piece. The following sections represent brief introductions that I feel my students can handle with ease.
Biographical Information
There are several websites that provide adequate biographical background information to supply my students for the purposes of this unit.
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/Michelangelo.htm and http://www.wga.hu/tours/sistina/index_a.html. These documents can be used with highlighters to underscore the relevant information about Michelangelo’s quick rise as an artist and sculptor, his agony and ecstasy as he worked on the Sistine Chapel, and his exceptionally long life for a man of his time.
The Chapel
Students are always interested in how Michelangelo came to “understand” the human figure represented so poignantly in the scenes of the Chapel. The Chapel itself consists of main scenes -- the histories -- in the center of the shallow barrel vault. Alternate larger and smaller panels represent the opening passages of the Bible, from the “Creation” to the “Drunkenness of Noah.” At each of the corners of the smaller panels there are pictured idealized nude youth, variously interpreted as angels or Neo-platonic perfections of human beauty. These nudes were directly influenced by Michelangelo’s intense study of the human form at the Carraro quarries, north of Florence. The Prior of Santo Spiritu also provided Michelangelo with access to human corpses upon which he performed bodily dissections. He performed these dissections by candlelight, during the middle of the night while everyone was asleep, often leaving him with little sleep to continue work the next day. This story is one that shows Michelangelo’s obsession with his craft and always grabs the attention of students. His portrayals of the human form are arguably the best ever completed.
In 1527, Pope Clement VIII commissioned him to paint the fresco of “The Last Judgment” for the Sistine Chapel but work commenced under Pope Paul III in 1536 and was completed in 1541. The spirit of the work is totally different from that of the ceiling unveiled 29 years earlier. I will ask my students to compare the “Creation” scene to “The Last Judgment” to see if they recognize the differences in style and form between the two.
Fresco Buono-- Wall Plaster Painting
The next subject, for our purposes, necessary in understanding the complexities of the Sistine Chapel is the artistic process of wall plaster painting known as fresco buono. Using this process, Michelangelo mixed the plaster, ground the pigments into paint, pounded his charcoal guides onto the wet plaster, and began applying the many layers of thin pure color pigment paint to the wall, which created a lasting piece of art, a chemical process which continued for 200 years all while the pigments grew in intensity. Coppleston’s
Michelangelo
, has a wonderful description of this process (258). I will bring this process directly into the classroom, demonstrating to my students by actually bringing in plaster, oil paints, a charcoal guide, and brushes to demonstrate the arduous and tedious process. My intent is to show them that each small section had to be completed quickly before the plaster dried. Showing them the dimensions of the Chapel would be critical to their realization of why Michelangelo took so long to complete the Chapel. The sheer size was overwhelming. As a math connection, I might guide them to calculate the area we covered in our demonstration and compare it that of the area of the whole decorated chapel.
Restoration
Finally it might be important for the students to understand that between 1984 and 1994, because of widespread degradation of the Chapel, the Nippon Television Network Corporation of Japan helped to finance yet another in a series of restorations of the Chapel with a $ 4.2 million grant in return for exclusive photographic and filming rights, a process that proved very controversial. The goal of the new restoration was to remove the layers of soot, glue, and past restoration additions and also to reattach the fresco where the paint had begun to pull away from the ceiling. These procedures were to restore the frescos to the state of brilliance and color that Michelangelo had intended.
Seeing pictures of before and after will help the students visualize its condition. Cracks had opened in the ceiling, frequently letting in the rain and thus causing water damage in many regions of the frescos. Humidity stains were also evident, and salt left behind from evaporating water had accumulated enough to create whitish stains that mottled the work, leaving some paint to blister. The ceiling was also covered in a layer of caked glue and smoke deposits. Additions of smaller, previous restorations subdued the brilliance of color that had once belonged to the frescos. The opinion that the damage to Michelangelo’s frescos was so great that scholars began to describe the artist as a “painter insensitive to color” was put to rest with the restoration. This will be our final layer of understanding.
At the end of this process, which should take three days, I will ask them to list and discuss what they now know about the piece, explaining that broad spectrum understanding comes from a more complete investigation and that this process can be applied to literature as well.